So what is it like being back in Asia, and in Kuala Lumpur in particular? Well, we’ve been here a week and barely left our neighbourhood. It’s not that our hood is pure genius. It’s adequate, though. There is a row of food stalls in the alley out front of our building to provide us with a variety of dirt cheap sustenance. There is a 24 hour restaurant on the corner for the same purpose. We have within five or ten minutes the city’s only outlet for Malaysia’s first microbrew. It’s not that great, but it’s a start. There is also a branch of the local Brussels Beer Café chain for when we want a ten dollar Hoegaarden. A German place lurks not too far away as well. The Petronas Towers are five minutes away and they have a huge mall underneath of them, with a couple of good-sized grocery stores. So I guess we’re relatively covered for shopping.

Now that we’re back, it doesn’t seem like we were gone all that long. We think back to Shanghai and that was just the middle of January. When we were in Vancouver, I in particular (J) found myself getting sucked back in. That’s how home is sometimes. But now that I’m back in Asia, I don’t really miss being in Vancouver. It seems much closer now than it has in the past, for one thing. Having gone back and forth across the ocean a couple of times now I can safely say that it is a much less daunting prospect now than it has been in the past.

Asia, too, seems smaller. Shanghai, Hong Kong, Phnom Penh all seem like right around the corner, not too far away. Japan still seems far, but not as far since we’ve now flown over it a couple of times. But yeah, it just seems entirely conceivable that we could end up in any one of those places at any time. We probably won’t – we have other places to visit like Singapore, Borneo and various places around Malaysia. But there is comfort in being familiar with those sorts of places.

So for now, we are very comfortable here. We’re still sorting out the details of living in KL, like where to find decent coffee beans and piddly things like that. But for the most part, we are pretty happy to be here, the weather is very tropical and pleasant, and we are able to traverse between the modern world and the third world in just a block or two here, more seamlessly than in perhaps any other city I’ve ever seen. Life is good here, and it will probably only get better as we figure out how to get things done in this town.